How to design a UI in which QT can be easily replaced with any other library

Question

I am about to start designing a UI. The UI is expected to be complex and will have several screens one of which will be a text editor. The application is in C++ and in order to leverage some existing functionality, I have decided to use Qt for the UI. However, I want to be able to write the UI in such a way that it is easy to replace Qt with any other UI library at a later point - or even use different libraries for different platforms.

I am leaning towards containing the QT objects in my own classes and using my classes throughout. Is this a good design? I preferred this as opposed to sub-classing(which is recommended by Qt) as subclassing seems to be a very rigid binding. However, this means that I will have to write a wrapper for every method that Qt exposes and I will also not be able to use QtCreator.

What do you think? Could you describe the advantages/disadvantages of the choice of method. It would be great if you could point me to any examples or to any good design principles.

Answer 1

You don't. The GUI libraries are the abstraction. If you really want to compile your application with different backends - you might look into WxWidgets. But be warned - the library is very different from Qt.